Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,3

called and left their flight number on her machine—sounding even farther away than he was, over their staticky connection, farther away than the tropics. Likely exhausted by his mania.

T., who had always seemed the most solid of young men. It went to show you. The madness lurked in all of them. Smack a man down in nature and he returned to his Cro-Magnon roots.

Casey was looking at her sidelong, waiting.

“What something?”

Could she know what Hal knew, could Hal have told her? He wouldn’t. He would not.

“My job.”

Relief.

“The telemarketing thing?”

“Yeah. The deal is, it’s phone sex.”

Susan’s head jerked to the left. Her neck hurt, it was so sudden. Past Casey’s profile the side of a moving truck read STARVING STUDENTS.

“Case, please. You almost gave me whiplash. Can people get, like, sideways whiplash?”

“I’m serious, it’s a 900 number.”

The set of her lips was the confirmation: the lips and the chin, its slight lift. Even as a toddler she had lifted her chin like that when she was being stubborn.

“You actually mean it.”

“Sleazy, yeah. That’s what I like about it. I wanted to give you a heads-up, is all.”

“Tell me you just connect the calls, or something.”

“Come on. That wouldn’t be any fun.”

She found her eyes were watering annoyingly—couldn’t she even take a joke? Damn it. Big deal. Laugh it off.

She turned away and looked out her window.

“And your father already knows this?” she asked, her gaze still steadily averted. Another truck; they were boxed in. This one was yellow and read PURITAN.

She looked to her left again, then back to the right: STARVING STUDENTS. PURITAN. STARVING STUDENTS. PURITAN. And here they were, between the two. It was a clear rebuke. A rebuke from the world, which knew them both and knew everything. Oh how the world reflected you in its unending streams of atoms, churning atoms out of which significance beamed—significance, but not purpose. The great collective knowingness of the world was a library of the hidden, a vast repository. But it was not meaning. It was the sum of an infinitude of parts, was all. There was the paint on the sides of trucks, the trucks themselves, which commerce and roads had brought beside her like this . . . in Casey’s car, the car between the trucks, they were neither starving students nor puritans. They were sluts.

She was a bad mother and a slut; her daughter was a bad daughter and a slut. Two sluts.

The traffic started to move again.

Of course, personally she wanted to be a slut. She rejoiced in it. It was the sole creative gesture of her life.

“Shit,” said Casey, and swerved around a pothole.

It was the private room in her house, it was Bluebeard’s locked closet—the only space, since the accident, where she was not only a dutiful mother or wife. Say what you liked about husbands: mother, now there was a role that typecast you for the rest of your days . . . being a slut was a survival tactic. No more, no less—that sly, indulgent freedom, that liberty in its rotten deceit, the sweetness in the rot. It had saved her from despair more than once.

When she was young she’d been pedantic on the subject: monogamy was authoritarian, a form of property law. On occasion she’d even tried to convince Hal, who had a more conventional mindset. There had been long earnest nights of conversation, now blurred in retrospect—one ego struggling to free itself from the encumbrance of another. Since then she’d dropped all that as a series of rationalizations. Arguments could be made, but at its base sleeping with many men who were not her husband was a pure satisfaction, an expression of greed and vanity, a glorification of herself. She could freely admit it; she did. In those spans of time, sleeping with other men, she emerged from obscurity into the light. She was the subject of the biopic: the camera followed her face, thus slowing time, and a score accompanied her movements. She liked to see herself with others; she wanted to be known.

And Casey, in the wheelchair, how could she make that gesture? It was the wrong kind of freedom for Casey, it was a category error. Yet here was Casey, willful as always, stubbornly ignoring the fact that her gesture was compromised. Yes, yes, this was the manner of her revolt—it was parallel—Susan saw that now. The two of them were the same in this, though Casey had no idea.

But Casey could not walk. She could not walk